[gavinsyancey]

Autonomous (non-teleoperated) humanoid robots that can do useful work in an unfamiliar environment do not exist. And nobody's close enough to making them to understand if they're possible with our current level of technology, let alone how.

[mkl]

Most initial work for them would be in familiar, well-controlled environments - replacing humans in existing factories. I think whether they'd be cost effective for that will remain unknown even after a few years in service though.

[gavinsyancey]

Factory work that can be straightforwardly automated by robots generally already is, by special-purpose factory robots. The remaining tasks are generally:

* Tasks where poorly-paid humans are cheaper than expensive factory robots. Humanoid robots are more complex / fiddly so will be more expensive than existing factory robots. No help here.

* Tasks where human dexterity has an advantage over state-of-the-art robot actuators (e.g. sewing fabric panels into garments). Better robotics could help here, but the advancement needed is better actuators, not AI and a humanoid form-factor. And if you solve this you'd be better off putting your new end-effector on an existing 6dof platform.

* Supervising robotic equipment and handling exceptions. But then you get to "handling poorly-specified unfamiliar tasks in the physical world" which is not currently a solved problem and there's no guarantee just throwing more compute at it will be sufficient to solve this. So far all humanoid robot demos have either been either known tasks in a tightly-controlled environment, teleportation, or so poorly-functioning as to be obviously not fit for purpose.

[cogman10]

Totally agree.

I'd also point out that what makes this whole thing smell of being a grift is the fact that what's being chased is humanoid.

Humans are not the pinnacle of dexterity or stability. And freed from biological constraints, it makes no sense why we'd use the human form as a reference.

Making a humanoid robot is a hard thing to do, for sure, but it's also not particularly useful. The routines needed to balance a robot or correct for a slip are interesting to solve, but don't really make for a better robot which is more capable of doing the dishes or folding the laundry.

If I'm amazon, for example, then the most useful form factor for a general purpose robot is 2 arms on a 4 wheel omnidirectional rolling platform.

[taneq]

Our hands are actually amazing, to a degree that’s hard to comprehend unless you’ve tried to build something equivalent. Our finger tips can discern features down to around 10 microns, detect a wide range of vibrations and single shocks, manipulate objects two orders of magnitude smaller than them, grasp an incredible range of weird shapes and materials reliably, repeat pre-learned motions remarkably quickly, and with training carry kilograms, all while weighing about a kilogram and reliably operating maintenance free for tens of thousands of hours. Oh and they’re made of meat.

An artificial manipulator with even half of these features would be the holy grail of robotics. Doing them all at once is a miracle.

[cogman10]

Completely agree. My point is more that even though our hands are amazing and even if we decided we want all the features of hands, there's no reason why you'd design such a device with 5 fingers and an oddly placed opposable thumb. There's no reason you'd have more than 2 joints per finger.

That's what I'm calling a grift of the humanoid robots. They are focusing pretty heavily on making manipulators shaped like hands, which don't perform anywhere near hand capabilities. The form is mattering more than the functionality which introduces a lot of unnecessarily hard to solve functionality problems.

The actual hard part of doing something like folding cloths isn't even the manipulation (though it's part of it) you mostly just need a few pincers. The hard part is that fabric changes like crazy in a 3 dimensional way on every motion. Just identifying "this is a shirt" is a hard problem to solve. Further deciding how to fold said shirt is extra difficult. But even further, getting a robot to know "this is where this shirt should be put away" and "this is how I should handle new cloths" is crazy hard. That's the part that I've seen absolutely no evidence that any of these humanoid robots are making any sort of progress on. The most impressive ones are cheating with a guy in the room over doing the task. Not exactly something I'd want in my home. Perhaps in a nuclear reactor.

[taneq]

I get your point about strictly anthropomorphic robots. There's definite scope for improvement there - I think Boston Dynamics' recent videos on their design process for the hands for Atlas is fascinating, and the way the fingers (in fact most/all(?) of the robot's joints) can flex both ways is a definite improvement. I also think that pure legged locomotion is dumb in an urban environment, compared with wheeled legs like a lot of recent robots are using.

[ForOldHack]

I would say that turtles are the pinnacle of stability, and longevity, and so we have Roombas. But, Racoons are at the pinnacle of dexterity, and Octopodes are at the pinnacle of dimensional manipulation...

but personally, I would welcome our cyper-coon overlords.

[p1esk]

We’re experiencing gpt-2 moment in robotics now. This means in about 2-3 years they will do useful work (cooking, repairs, cleaning, etc).

[ben_w]

The extrapolation cannot be justified. It may be much longer or tomorrow.

[gavinsyancey]

So far all humanoid robot demos have either been either known tasks in a tightly-controlled environment, teleportation, or so poorly-functioning as to be obviously not fit for purpose. It's possible throwing more compute at the problem will work and they'll be useful in a few years. Or maybe we're actually experiencing a Markov-chain / ELIZA moment and are multiple decades away from anything actually useful.

[cogman10]

I'll do you one further.

Self driving cars is far from a solved problem. It's something we've been working on for the last 20 years at least. We are getting closer, some solutions are impressive (like waymo). But even those ultimately need operators in the area of the cars to solve the problem of the car getting stuck.

Self driving cars are an infinitely simpler problem to solve vs a general purpose humanoid robot. You have basically 2 outputs, acceleration and steering. You have rules simple enough that I was driving at 14. With enough input, you'd think self driving could be completed in a snap. But it's not there yet.

Humanoid robots which are useful will come after widespread deployment of L5 self driving cars. Since we don't have that, I have no faith that we are close to useful humanoids.

[ForOldHack]

However, self driving vacuums are a done deal.

"I have no faith that we are close to useful humanoids." I agree completely. We still have competitions about having robots walk up stairs and open doors, and balance while doing those things...

What would be the top uses of humanoid robots?

[cogman10]

> What would be the top uses of humanoid robots?

To replace humans for general tasks. McDonalds would like to use them to flip burgers, take orders, and deliver meals. Amazon would like to use them to pick items from their warehouses for delivery.

I'd argue, though, in both cases the "humanoid" part isn't what they really want or need. Even in the mcdonalds case, so long as the robot is "cute" enough to interact with customers, then it can be a box with an arm.

Of course, a major problem with using robots in the food industry is cleaning and hygiene. Robots tend to have lots of hard to clean cracks that will happily carry around germs. Even in medicine, we are finding that things like laparoscopic devices are beasts that are almost impossible to fully clean.

[mathgeek]

They're already driving, as an example of why your claim of "gpt-2 moment" isn't as far out there as it may first seem.

[dyauspitr]

We said the same thing about Waymo, that it was perpetually in the future. It took them less than a decade. The robots today are functionally capable, they don’t have the right fuzzy intelligence yet. It’s purely a data problem (lack of) and a lot of people are working on it.

[darkwater]

Are you saying autonomous driving is a solved problem, even at scale? I haven't seen any Waymo in my small town in Southern Europe yet.

[OkayPhysicist]

From what I've seen with Waymo, autonomous driving in relatively good conditions (light to medium rain, fog, or sunny) is a solved technical problem, even in small, winding streets. Snow is the next big hurdle, and they're actively working on that in Denver and Detroit.

They're being conservative with their rollout mostly because of civic issues. Most places do not have a legal framework for "what if your autonomous vehicle hits someone?" yet. Even if Waymos never were at fault for a collision with a person, you can always have cases like the one in Georgia back in October where a bicyclist wasn't looking where they were going and rammed into one. The shaky legal ground is a pretty big impediment right now, and that's in the US where we have much laxer laws about corporations killing people.

[darkwater]

Yeah, I suspected that, but legislation and dealing with who is responsible and what happens if an autonomous vehicles directly kills/hurts someone or is involved in an accident it IS part of the problem, luckily.

Then, there will be concerns about the scaling costs. If it makes economical sense only in densely populated zones, what's the point? I mean, yes, it will be yet another business that works only in cities in that case, but that will not then make it universal as cars are.

[dyauspitr]

If they can pull off year round driving in Manhattan, and they have, it’s a solved problem. Rollout it slow due to bureaucracy, appetite for progressiveness and catering to entrenched business interests but it will show up everywhere it’s profitable eventually.

[sdfsdfs34dfsdf]

> "small town" in "Southern Europe"

I've highlighted the two main issues you are currently experiencing.

[darkwater]

Then it's not a solved problem.

[logicchains]

It's not just a data problem, it's a hardware problem. Transformer-based robots require even more processing power than plain LLMs, as they also need to process visual and spatial/touch input. We don't have GPUs capable of fast inference on a SOTA LLM that would fit in a robot brain form factor, let alone also run fast enough spatial and visual processing. And there's currently nothing even approaching a feasible solution for cooling such a device.

[b112]

https://www.1x.tech/

[RealityVoid]

I have been following them since they were Halodi robotics. They're cool, but nowhere near the level of autonomy you need. My theory is that before household robots become a thing we should have self driving cars be a common occurrence, since that is a much much simpler problem.

[red75prime]

If there's no unknown unknowns in the brain, it's most likely possible. As the universal approximation theorem and empirical results of scaling SGD+RL suggest. Whether it will be economically viable remains to be seen. The human cerebellum has a peculiar structure and 80% of the brain's neurons after all.

[ben_w]

The parameter count equivalent of a human brain is not yet known, but if it was one per synapse then a full human brain replica would need about 1.5e14.

We also don't yet know how to be as efficient with training examples as any living creatures' brain, and we only partially make up for this by training on so many examples it would take you a million or so years to do the same, so we'd still stuggle with something proportionally smaller-brained such as a cat.

That said, remote controlled androids are going to be economically disruptive, as they make every (unlicensed) job open to outsourcing from an office in a low wage country.

[xvilka]

Real neurons are orders of magnitude more complex than their artificial pseudo-approximation (it is all based on the century-old understanding of how neurons work). You can think of _individual_ biological neuron as an analog of the small artificial neural network. You can see this simple visual explanation on YouTube[1]. So we aren't even close. It doesn't mean the AI is impossible, it just means people underestimate the "computing power" of real brains, as well as that AI, even the future one might be totally different in how it works from the natural intelligence.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmtQPrH-gC4

[jampekka]

Brain's information flow also isn't just through direct neuron-to-neuron connections. Firing also releases neuromodulators into the extracellular space which affects how other neurons operate. Furhermore neuron connection architecture is very different between brain and feedforward ANNs, with the former exhibiting a lot of recurrent connections.

[red75prime]

Deep learning doesn't try to mimic all the intricacies of biological processes. It tries to approximate the end result (information processing).

[red75prime]

But for biological neurons to do something that can't be efficiently approximated on a digital computer (but conductive to useful information processing) they need to have unknown unknowns (well, partial unknowns like an unknown quantum algorithm will do too).

We don't know the violations of the physical Church-Turing thesis that are conductive for machine learning. We don't have evidence for their existence in the brain (although, the brain would be the prime candidate for finding them as evolution works directly with the true physical laws).

BTW, large ANNs don't try to model how the brain does things. They are trying to mimic what the brain does. So, using "how many transistors/artificial neurons it takes to model a biological neuron" is not a good approach.

We have no evidence. We even have no solid theories how this can work (Penrose's OrchOR is "OrchOR somehow taps into mathematical knowledge somehow encoded into the structure of spacetime"). But people, for some reason, insist that there should be something there. I can't attribute it to anything else but to deeply entrenched feeling of human exceptionalism.

[formerly_proven]

You're talking about a philosophical debate whether the brain is computable, the other commenters are pointing out that even conservative estimates point to a brain-like NN requiring over a quadrillion parameters.

[red75prime]

...assuming that modelling the physical structure of the brain is the only way to model its functions.

[formerly_proven]

Building a "NN with similar capability as the brain" is not modelling its physical structure. The assumption is not made.

[wqaatwt]

We certainly don’t need to replicate humans or overly anthropomorphise robots. Just like cars didn’t need to imitate mechanical horses.